Killer cop vengeance: Was the OPD killing of Alan Blueford a retaliatory hit?

Oddly enough, Floyd “Money” Mayweather fought and defeated Robert Guerrero on May 4, 2013, just one day prior to the candlelight vigil and community memorial organized by JAB, the Justice 4 Alan Blueford Coalition, in loving memory of Alan Dwayne Blueford.

May 6, 2013, is the one-year anniversary of Alan’s murder by OPD Officer Miguel Masso. The candlelight march and memorial began at the park known as Sunnyside, deep in the East Oakland community. Marchers left the park, turned down 94th Avenue, turned again down Birch Street and stopped in the driveway of 9230 Birch, where Alan was murdered.

The Blueford family and the Justice 4 Alan Blueford coalition held a vigil for Alan on the one-year anniversary of his murder by Oakland police officer Miguel Masso. For more information about what happened to Alan, go to www.justice4alanblueford.org. Chalkupy art by Fresh Juice Party: www.FreshJuiceParty.org. – Video: Mollie Costello

This time last year, just after midnight on May 6, 2012, Alan Dwayne Blueford and two of his friends were awaiting a ride on 90th Avenue when they were racially profiled, terrorized, chased and assaulted by the OPD. Alan was summarily executed.

Alan had just spoken with his parents. He and his friends had all watched the same Floyd “Money” Mayweather score a victory over then WBA welterweight champion Miguel Cotto at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on the previous evening.

Alan and his friends were just standing on 90th Avenue awaiting a ride from friends when Masso and his partner came oozing by, driving slowly, with their lights off, noiseless – predators in blue, on drive-by-killer silent tires.

This time last year, just after midnight on May 6, 2012, Alan Dwayne Blueford and two of his friends were awaiting a ride on 90th Avenue when they were racially profiled, terrorized, chased and assaulted by the OPD. Alan was summarily executed.

Killer cop Miguel Masso did not have his lapel camera on, in violation of OPD policy. What was he trying to hide? And was he trying to ensure that he didn’t end up on video, as killer cop Johannes Mehserle had?

Incidences such as these give credence to the fact that the use of deadly force by police against Black people is not and cannot be attributed to accident or random violence patterns the way the mainstream media would have the public believe.

According to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s updated “Every 36 Hours: Report on the Extrajudicial Killings of 120 Black People”: “A human rights crisis confronts Black people in the United States. Since Jan. 1, 2012, police and a much smaller number of security guards and self-appointed vigilantes have murdered at least 120 Black women and men. These killings are definitely not accidental or random acts of violence or the work of rogue cops. As we noted in our April 6, 2012, ‘Trayvon Martin Is All of US!‘ report, the use of deadly force against Black people is standard practice in the United States and woven into the very fabric of the society.”

Therefore, it strains the intelligent analysis of AFRIKAN life to commit to the belief that these extrajudicial killings by police across the country and around the world are “coincidental” or a part of some big unplanned and random series of cosmic mistakes, to be blamed on one “bad cop apple” in a barrel of harried civil servants “just doing their jobs.”

For example, like Enjoli Mixon, many grassroots Haitian people have returned home from work to find the remains of family members decomposing in their living rooms, murdered by the occupying army of U.N. MINUSTAH forces and/or the Haitian National Police. Both are militarized, trained and controlled by the U.S. CIA and/or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

On the evening that Alan Dwayne Blueford was killed, InPDUM (International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement), one of several community organizations based in East Oakland, had organized a Court for Black Justice (CBJ), putting the OPD on trial.

This is not the first time this particular praxis has occurred. It has its genesis in the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, who developed the community awareness strategies of watching and intervening in police attacks against the Black community. Huey P. Newton, law book in hand, routinely addressed and prevented acts of police brutality by being informed of and able to quote state law governing police conduct.

Tribunals were held in which the Black Panther Party for Self Defense could speak to the community and the community could speak in return. One such instance was enacted in the film, “The Murder of Fred Hampton,” with a courtroom scene in which the people got to ask relevant questions and “put the pig on trial.”

At the InPDUM Court for Black Justice, surviving relatives of family members murdered by police in San Francisco, Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay Area, testified about the killing of their relatives and the aftermath of police harassment in their continued fight for justice.

Enjoli Mixon told of how her brother was slain in her house and of the subsequent police harassment she, her family and the immediate community faced. Lovelle Mixon was a young Black man who chose to fight an alleged third strike parole violation by killing four Oakland police officers and escaping rather than become interred in the U.S. prison industrial complex slavocracy for life.

She spoke of how he might possibly have escaped with his life, had his hiding place not been revealed to police by a neighbor.

MXGM addresses this aspect too, within the context of mainstream media’s actions. They point out that within the first six months of 2012, every 36 hours one Black person in the U.S. was executed: “The corporate media have given very little attention to these extrajudicial killings. We call them ‘extrajudicial’ because they happen without trial or any due process, against all international law and human rights conventions. Those few mainstream media outlets that mention the epidemic of killings have been and are unwilling to acknowledge that the killings are systemic – meaning they are embedded in institutional racism and national oppression. On the contrary, nearly all of the mainstream media join in a chorus that sings the praises of the police and read from the same script that denounces the alleged ‘thuggery’ of the deceased. Sadly, too many people believe the police version of events and the media’s ‘blame-the-victim’ narratives that justify and support these extrajudicial killings.”

According to Mixon’s family, he was shot over 87 times and his body was so improperly preserved that his skin was grey and peeling and his casket could not be closed (during the funeral service) because the resultant odor of decomposition would have been worse. This fact, coupled with the city’s refusal to release the body to the family until it began decomposing, was a form of cruel and unusual punishment, and caused more deliberate trauma. Thus, the brutalization that Lovelle Mixon underwent at the hands of the OPD – even after death – was visible at his funeral.

But according to his sister Enjoli, Lavelle died with a smile on his face.

Was it coincidence that Mixon was killed within months of the brutal murder of 22-year-old Oscar Grant III? This reporter thinks not.

Oscar Grant was tortured and then shot at point blank range on the Fruitvale station BART platform in front of thousands of witnesses who saw and video recorded the crime. The police tried to take hundreds of peoples’ cell phones, but a few escaped them.

Killer cop Johannes Mehserle was allowed to “run for the hills,” fleeing the state to Las Vegas, Nevada, after his part in the torture and lynching of Grant. He apparently thought that he should be allowed to just walk away from a crime scene by stating that it was all an accident.

He thought for some reason that he should not be held accountable for his crimes. Only the power of the people uprising forced his extradition, trial and conviction, albeit on a lesser charge than murder. He is the only police officer in Alameda County history to be prosecuted for his crimes, although his “sentence” was a travesty and no justice for Oscar Grant’s family.

Mehserle received a mere slap on the wrist, an involuntary manslaughter verdict – as though there was no gun used in the case! – from a Los Angeles judge who maintained that “race wasn’t an issue”! Mehserle was given credit for time served and released after said “credit” was applied to his very flimsy sentence.

The people took to the streets continually five times in support of the family of Oscar Grant and against police violence and murder.

Then there is the case of Kenneth Wayne Harding Jr., who was shot multiple times in the neck and back by the SFPD for an alleged $2 light rail fare evasion. He was then denied medical help and forced to bleed out and die in broad daylight in full view of a horrified Bayview Hunters Point community. This wouldn’t have happened in a white community. His murder was also captured on video that was so graphic You Tube took it off line.

Denika Chatman, Harding’s mother, has spoken out and continues to speak out, educate, organize, wake up communities about her son’s murder and the aftermath of harassment her family has faced in coordinated attacks from both the Seattle and San Francisco police departments.

She is also uniting with other families who have suffered the same senseless tragedies, uniting Black and Brown communities in the understanding that these attacks are not random occurrences.

The people took to the streets continually five times in support of the family of Oscar Grant and against police violence and murder.

In the 21st century, this is one of the legacies of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, what slain leader Fred Hampton called “observation and participation,” waking people up and organizing around specific goals. This gets action.

On the evening of May 6, 2013, Oakland police officer Miguel Masso shot himself in the foot after shooting three bullets at half-second intervals at point blank range into Alan Dwayne Blueford as he lay on his back on the ground.

Masso was taken immediately to the hospital.

Alan Blueford was left to bleed out for four hours before he was then taken to the hospital and pronounced dead. The OPD did not call the Blueford family. One of Alan’s friends did.

Yet mainstream media faithfully refuses to report that police are killing unarmed members of Black and Brown communities at an ever increasing and alarming rate.

Cops get to “freak out” and kill, as is stated in Masso’s police report. Cops get to “think they see a weapon,” think s/he was reaching for a waistband, shirt and/or jacket pocket, or swear that “a shootout occurred forcing them to act in self-defense or to apprehend” and used deadly force, implying that criminal activity is taking place.

Whatever the excuse, a Black person dies.

Yet, Miguel Masso stated in his report that he “couldn’t think clearly for a minute or two,” before he shot and fatally wounded Alan Blueford.

How is this different from Johannes Mehserle thinking that he could resign from his job, run from the scene of a crime, say it was an accident, and leave the state to avoid prosecution just because he’s a white cop?

What? Masso wasn’t in the moment mentally and Mehserle wasn’t there physically so this makes the murder of innocents OK?

And when their lies are later brought to light, do police agencies admit their crimes? No. And are they prosecuted for their lies and the deaths that they have caused? No.

Mainstream media faithfully refuses to report that police are killing unarmed members of Black and Brown communities at an ever increasing and alarming rate.

The truly chilling part is that proving the police lying is no longer considered to be compelling enough evidence to reverse guilty verdicts against Afrikan people and set them free, as has been continually proven in the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners and prisoners of war.

And it is certainly not capable of reversing murderous, white supremacist intent and actions and bringing dead loved ones back to life. This is not a Road Runner cartoon on TV.

This is not a Road Runner cartoon, these were not accidents, and there is no rewind button.

But there does seem to be a replay button because these murders keep happening.

Television plays a big part in this by glorifying what racist and moneyed white moguls erroneously portray as everyday police work. Hollywood’s role is to pump up the volume to persuade the public that everyday police work is composed of nothing but violence in the forms of multiple car and foot chases, beat downs, police retaliations against cop killers, and Wild Wild West, sheriff-bad guy, John Wayne-type shoot outs.

Visual acuity does not match reality. TV cops can go home after being nearly fatally shot or after brutalizing some alleged suspect. The shows’ ratings go up. Everyone is happy. There is no visually exciting police show depicting cops earning those fat calories in donuts from writing police reports all day.

But the reality is that taxi drivers take more risks and are subjected to more dangers and are in a certain sense just as prone to racial profiling, judging by how difficult it is for a Black person to get a cab in San Francisco, and/or to reliably depend upon a cab showing up in certain sections of San Francisco or in Deep East Oakland.

And as we all know, police departments tend to retaliate when any of theirs get scratched or killed – or divulge office secrets.

Note the two cases of ex-cops Frank Serpico and Christopher Dorner.

Whistleblower and ex-NYPD cop Francesco “Frank” Vincent Serpico has nothing on ex-LAPD officer Christopher Dorner for the seriousness and danger factors in what they both did; i.e. expose police corruption in their respective police departments and cities.

“This is the way they do it,” Serpico told the Daily News. “They make you a psycho, and everything you do gets discounted. But I told Adrian just to tell the truth as he knows it and to be himself. When you tell the truth, they can’t do a damn thing to you.”

Frank Serpico survived an assassination attempt, testified before the Knapp Commission in 1971, retired the following year and had a movie made about him starring Al Pacino in 1973. Now he’s about to partner up in a $50 million law suit. But Frank Serpico is a white male.

Christopher Dorner wasn’t so lucky. He is horribly, messily dead. There was no Knapp Commission for him to testify before. He was decorated and Special Forces military and still wasn’t believed. He told the truth. He was fired. He wrote a stirring and precise manifesto about what happened. He, like Nat Turner had decided that enough was enough.

So his own department hunted him down with drones, killed him then burned the body parts in meltdown temperatures to make sure that nothing of him remained because Dorner wrote a manifesto naming names, dates, times and incidences of fellow LAPD officers’ racism and extensive use of excessive force, practices that continue and have escalated to this day.

But then, Christopher Dorner was a Black man. So he’s been labeled a psycho with a “malignant, narcissistic personality disorder” by the publication Business Insider: Law and Order.

So now, when what is alleged to have been the “deadliest day in the history of the Oakland police” occurs, we see a pattern. Yet another pissed off Black man – Lovelle Mixon – but most definitely not a cop, decides that enough is enough and that he will seriously “criticize the unjust with the weapon,” as assassinated Black Panther Party Field Marshall George Jackson stated in his posthumously published book, “Blood in My Eye.”

Logic presumes that PD retaliation will at some point manifest.

Whether Mixon had read George Jackson or not is not the point. The point is that he tweaked the tail of a monster when he made the adult Afrikan decision that he wasn’t going back to being enslaved and entombed in the prison industrial complex for the remainder of his life.

The monster didn’t like that. The monster fears educated, aware Afrikans, male or female. The pig doesn’t like the trial in the streets either. He doesn’t like being outgunned, even temporarily. So he criminalizes, kills and then labels all forms of rebellion as evidence of psychological and pathological derangement in the rebel or the revolutionary.

However, I am sure that Haitian human rights heroes and the grassroots masses have all of their mental faculties, and that such leaders as Fidel Castro are possessed of their mental acuity as well.

Lovelle Mixon is unfortunately now horribly, messily dead. Being that he was shot 87 times, we can presume that the OPD officers who killed him qualified as being enraged as well as “freaked out” – enraged because four of their elite were taken out by a lone Black “rabbit” with a gun and “freaked out” trying to destroy the evidence that they aren’t invincible – or superior. But Lovelle Mixon was not crazy.

Fast forward to Miguel Masso and his summary execution of Alan Dwayne Blueford. According to Justice4AlanBlueford.org, “Masso claimed in his (police) report that he freaked out, perhaps a minute before he shot Alan Blueford, and was unable to hear or think clearly.”

What? He turned off his lapel cam and then shot and killed a young Black man after hunting him down – with his car lights off – in accordance with the tenets of the NYPD’s racist “stop and frisk” procedures, then “freaked out?”

I don’t think so.

The stop-and-frisk program decrees as a given that all Black and Brown men are dangerous, particularly at night – and, it seems, especially if they are doing nothing wrong.

And stop and frisk, as explained by New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelley, is a program designed “as a means of instilling fear in young African American and Hispanic men.” Kelly “stated that he targeted and focused on that group because he wanted to instill fear in them that every time they left their homes they could be targeted by police,” said 22-year NYPD veteran and state Sen. Eric Adams.

Johannes Mehserle and his partners racially profiled and harassed Oscar Grant and his friends. He and his partners tortured Oscar Grant physically while hurling racial epithets at all of them. Mehserle drew his Taser, holstered his Taser, drew his gun, killed Oscar Grant, then said, “It was an accident.” Except it wasn’t an accident.

Oscar Grant proved this by photographing his killer’s actions with his cell phone.

Oscar Grant was executed, as was Alan Dwayne Blueford. The difference is that Masso deliberately turned off his lapel cam, which seems to support a premeditated mindset that had something to hide.

If so, then Miguel Masso’s actions make horrible sense. Especially since OPD “consultant” William Bratton, formerly a police chief in New York and in Los Angeles, was recently hired by Oakland’s dysfunctional City Council.

Bratton is big on “aggressive” tactics, of which stop-and-frisk is but one.

Masso’s actions sound more and more like orders – orders for controlled, systemic racism, terrorism and lynching to be practiced by police exclusively against Black and Brown youth to enforce white supremacy.

Particularly in an atmosphere where police departments and city mayors collaborated bi-coastally to smash the Occupy movement, where the power of the people forced a killer cop to trial, and where a lone Afrikan is reputed to have taken out four of Oakland’s elite officers before meeting death at their hands.

It also sounds like cops are realizing that their vaunted technology has bitten them in the ass when a child with a cell phone (Oscar Grant) can photograph a killer cop even as that cop is killing him with impunity. And when the public can also photograph police lynching and have the footage go viral on Vimeo and You Tube within hours, the whole world will have seen the footage multiple times, months before any trial and hours before even the hard copy news comes out. This puts a serious dent in any of several police lies that could be spun by cops to pretend these murders didn’t happen.

Furthermore, did Masso “freak out” while he was helping to torture a defenseless prisoner in a New York City jail cell? No. Was he freaking out while he steadfastly refused said tortured prisoner medical attention? No. These incidents were documented by the New York City Police Department, so his record of brutality was established before he got to Oakland. Why then was he hired and immediately turned loose in East Oakland, where he does not live, if not to commit criminal acts of murder?

And how did the weapon, a Sig Sauer, Model P230, 9mm caliber pistol, alleged to have been fired by Alan Blueford – regardless as to the fact that Blueford had no powder residue on his body, clothes or shoes and no drugs in his system – how did said weapon come to be disassembled and alleged to have been “found” at the scene, hours later, 20 feet or more from where Alan’s body fell?

Who did the gun belong to? No one knows, but the OPD and the press would have the public believe that Alan Blueford was a thug; thus the gun must have belonged to and been fired by him. Blame the victim, exonerate the killer cop, no incriminating video, case closed, says the OPD.

But don’t all cops have at least one “throw away” knife or gun upon their persons at all times? If so, did Masso choose that point in history to “throw away” his throw away gun? And then swear to his partner after the fact, “I swear he had a gun!”

Did Miguel Masso first consult his Officer’s Bill of Rights manual to make sure of the steps he had to take in order to allow him to kill without repercussion, before he went out that night?

Did he then go out, profile and then shoot an innocent youth? Did he plant a gun? And was all of this done before or after his highly trained, albeit lame ass shot himself in the foot?

It has become increasingly obvious that Black people are “without sanctuary” throughout the United States. “Nowhere is a Black woman or man safe from racial profiling, invasive policing, constant surveillance and overriding suspicion. All Black people – regardless of education, class, occupation, behavior or dress – are subject to the whims of the police, whose institutionalized racist policies and procedures require them to arbitrarily stop, frisk, arrest, brutalize and even execute Black people,” says the updated MXGM “Every 36 Hours“ report.

And out of the mouth of NYPD Police Commissioner Kelley comes the proof that the stop-and-frisk program is designed to plant fear in our hearts, by planting fear in the hearts of our children to stop resistance to systemic racism in order to protect the institution of white supremacy.

It has become increasingly obvious that Black people are “without sanctuary” throughout the United States.

This is what builds a slavocracy – if the oppressed become accustomed to the jackboots in their breakfast cereal. Yet I can hear the voice of Assata Shakur in filmmaker Gloria Renaldo’s “Eyes of the Rainbow” as she speaks of her grandmother admonishing her, “Don’t you get used to that place, do you hear me?” just before Assata Shakur escaped prison. And I can hear Assata’s response, as she said. “Yes, Grandmother.”

The next day, she escaped. A modern day Harriet Tubman, she hid and ran and lived to fight another day. She is now in exile.

As I watched the very moving ceremony of honor and remembrance for Alan Blueford and listened to Jeralynn Blueford’s heartfelt scream to the heavens before releasing white doves of peace, I thought on these and many more things.

In 2009, I found out about the funeral for Lovelle Mixon about an hour before it occurred, and just managed to get there in time. I distinctly remember that no one was allowed to approach the casket, something that is highly unusual.

Even Emmett Till’s family allowed this process – as badly as Till’s body was brutalized. This is an integral part of Afrikan funerals in this country, a process of saying final personal goodbyes. There is a profundity in the way a civilized people treats their dead.

I now know why no one but the family and the family’s personal photographer was allowed to even approach the first row of seats, much less the casket.

The Justice 4 Alan Blueford Coalition (JAB) has based itself deep within the Afrikan community that birthed it and has brought together many organizations and individuals to fight for justice for Alan and to stop continued police violence.

They’ve organized barbeques to feed the people and to increase community awareness, held multiple press conferences and rallies in downtown Oakland, gone en masse to and shut down at least one of several ineffectual City Council meetings, thoroughly analyzed and discredited the DA’s report entitled, “Investigation of the Shooting Death of Alan Blueford,” sought and received community support from churches, labor unions other community formations and the families from coast to coast who have lost loved ones to police violence; and they are continuing to build a foundation from which to gain support and unity in the fight against police violence.

The trio of Haitian drummers at the memorial, led by Will Bellot, spoke to approximately 150-200 incoming marchers about the necessity – rooted deep in Haitian Voudun culture – of speaking out against injustice. Pastor Lowery and Bishop Mario Gaines of Urojas Community Services spoke prayers to strengthen the Blueford Family, the supporters and all young Black and Brown men and women on the streets who face the obstacles and challenges of racism and staying alive. A moment of silence was observed, as lit candles were placed around a section of sidewalk that was chalked, “In Loving Memory of Alan Dwayne Blueford.”

Haitian drummers put a call out to our ancestors as the vigil procession arrives at the site of Alan’s murder by OPD officer Miguel Masso. – Video: Mollie Costello

Jeralynn Blueford spoke briefly, in praise of her son, as she and her husband Adam held the white dove they would release into the sky moments later.

The memorial for 2013 had ended. People gathered, networked, met and forged stronger ties of unity.

No one is showing any signs of giving up.

A luta continua (The struggle continues). All power to the people!

Malaika H Kambon is a freelance photojournalist and the 2011 winner of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association Luci S. Williams Houston Scholarship in Photojournalism. She also won the AAU state and national championship in Tae Kwon Do from 2007-2010. She can be reached at kambonrb@pacbell.net.